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Important Invention of the Week: Callisto

Callisto is a the third-party sexual assault reporting system that was designed to be used for universities and colleges.

But what makes it so great? It was created with the input of rape survivors and student activists. It was developed after more than a year of collecting feedback from sexual assault survivors.

Callisto allows a victim to file an incident report online, to “receive a clear explanation of their reporting options, and then either directly submit the report to their chosen authority or save it as a time-stamped record.”

The system was designed by nonprofit Sexual Health Innovations who have set up a Crowdrise fundraising page to get the Callisto up and running. The project has currently made over $20,000. However, organisers say they need to raise as much as $200,000 to staff and run it adequately.

The Callisto system is designed to maintain privacy and to prevent false reports by allowing victims to choose to have their perpetrator reported to authorities immediately if they had been reported by another user.

The victim would also receive a notification in the event that an additional report is made. But no other individuals or administrators would have access to the database to see whether any single person is listed as either an assailant or victim.

“We want to be clear: This is by survivors, for survivors and us understanding and having empathy for the trauma that survivors go through after a sexual assault and just how scary the reporting process is,” said Founder and Executive Director of Sexual Health Innovations Jessica Ladd.

“We want to make it very clear to survivors they control who it’s reported to and when,” Ladd said.

I think this is a really awesome move towards in encouraging survivors to report if they’re originally afraid or hesitant of reporting their sexual assault.